Yesterday, I found that, unfortunately,
advogato.org does not work anymore
– it's last version was from 2004 or so, and it
expects to find browser
cookies in some text file. However, times have changed, and
these days, those
cookies are stored in an SQLite-database.

Anyway, it's actually not too hard to publish by
hand. I am using
org-mode in emacs, which has some light-weight
markup syntax, as I discussed
here. I can simply type things there, and when I am
done, I run
org-export-as-html. That will also put the
result in my 'kill-ring' (i.e.,
paste buffer), so I can paste in the advogato web form, et
voilà!.

LaTeX (and to a lesser extend, HTML) is sometimes promoted
over WYSIWYG word
processors because it allegedly focuses on the
contents and allows you to
describe semantics, not looks. That is only partly
true, as anyone who wants
to insert e.g., a table in a document can attest to: in
MS-Word or Writer,
it's much easier to concentrate on table contents
than it is in
LaTeX. Programs like LyX alleviate this to some
extent, but for me it's a
bit too much on the WYSIWYG side.

So, I used to endure the pain of raw LaTeX (and HTML)
editing, because it
still we was the least painful way to get the what I
want. For LaTeX that
is, book-quality rendering, with all the magic of maths,
indices, numbering,
source code blobs and so on. For HTML, it would be
standards-compliant 'clean'
blobs that I can still understand, and can paste into e.g.,
a blog.

However, with org-mode the pain is mostly gone!
I can export to both HTML
and LaTeX and it really allows me to focus only on the
contents of what I want
to write (as said, org-mode-markup is really
lightweight); still it allows
for a lot of massaging of the output if needed. I can
imagine that this
'output massage' would be quite hard if I hadn't already
spent quite a bit of
time using 'raw' HTML and LaTeX - anyway, for me it works
very well. Coming
back to adding tables in documents: this is easy in
org-mode, and I can
even use the tables as little spreadsheets, with all the
power of GNU Calc
formulae.